Over there comes over here

Film at Miami Jewish festival focuses on Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.

A poignant scene in Beaufort, Israel's Academy Awards entry for best foreign film, shows a young Israeli commander in Lebanon freezing in fear as a fellow soldier is caught in a rain of mortar rounds.

"Liraz, get me inside, Liraz!" shouts the wounded soldier to the commander, who hovers in a doorway a few feet away, his eyes betraying a sense of shock and terror.

The drama, which is the closing night selection of the Miami Jewish Film Festival, is not about Israel's 34-day war in 2006 against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Filmed before that conflict, it is set in 2000 and tells of the last Israeli soldiers guarding an isolated outpost in southern Lebanon at the end of Israel's 18-year occupation.

War is "a cycle that just repeats itself," said director Joseph Cedar (Campfire, Time of Favor). "For a thousand years there were young men on this mountain, either capturing it or trying to protect it. By avoiding the specifics of the year 2000, it turns it into something that's a bit more classical."

The story takes place in a 12th century stone-walled crusader fortress atop a rocky hill in southern Lebanon. Beaufort served as a platform for Palestinian rocket attacks on northern Israel before the country's 1982 invasion and, in a battle celebrated in the Jewish state, became one of the first targets captured in that offensive.

As the occupation claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli soldiers and triggered anti-war protests at home, Israel pulled its army out of southern Lebanon and demolished its outposts, including the one in Beaufort.

"What was once a symbol of victory and bravery turned into a symbol of stupidity, of futile battles and of waste of human life," Cedar said. "That transition is something that's too literary not to turn into a film."

Based on real events but featuring fictional characters, Beaufort quickly became one of Israel's top-grossing features in 25 years when it was released in March 2007. And Cedar, a New York native who grew up in Jerusalem, was the first Israeli to win the Silver Bear award for best director at last year's Berlin International Film Festival.

Cedar got the idea for the movie in 2001 after reading a fictional monologue by Israeli writer Ron Leshem about an officer's fears and experiences in Beaufort. The article, based on interviews of many soldiers who served at the outpost, led Cedar, who lost two comrades during his nine-month army service in Lebanon in the late 1980s, to confront his fears as a young soldier.

He later met Leshem, and the two decided to join forces and adapt the article (which Leshem made a best-selling, award-winning novel) into a movie script.

Beaufort centers on Liraz, the controlling and overly private outpost commander. Amid speculation of an imminent withdrawal from Lebanon, Liraz and his subordinates wage a daily struggle to survive mortar attacks by an invisible enemy. The troops live in grim conditions within a concrete maze of underground tunnels, bunkers and observation posts.

As they watch comrades die, the soldiers confront their fears and become skeptical about the purpose of their mission. They question the decision to risk their lives to protect Beaufort and challenge the authority of Liraz, who ignores the impending evacuation until he is assigned to dismantle and blow up the outpost.

"We wrote an anti-war story whose hero is pro-war until the last moment," Leshem said, "and he doesn't understand that he's cannon fodder, even when everything crashes around him."

INFORMATIONAL BOX:

Miami Jewish Film Festival

Beaufort is not the only Oscar entry in this year's MJFF lineup; Brazil's submission, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, will open the fest, which runs Saturday through Jan. 27. For schedule details, see page 4E.